Disappearing kitchen island

[Tim Thaler] has been redoing his home, adding some fancy automation here and there. But when it came to the kitchen, he went all-out by installing an iPhone controlled disappearing island. In the video clip after the break you can see [Tim] dial up some extra counter and storage space from his smart phone. One click causes it to slowly rise from the depths, shedding the carpet tiles as it goes.

Directly beneath the kitchen is an unfinished storage room. [Tim] framed a hole in the floor above, and sourced a used scissor lift for about $380 to do the heavy lifting. It operates smoothly and isn’t all that loud. It sure makes for an interesting feature if he ever decides to sell the place.

We thought it was a nice touch that the storage room hiding the mechanical parts of the hack has a hidden entrance. You must travel through the billiards room in the basement to access it, turning the ball rack to unlatch the entrance.

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31 thoughts on “Disappearing kitchen island”

Given the quality of the build otherwise (it is AWESOME), I’m a little surprised that a trapdoor wasn’t used. I’d just as soon have a food preparation surface that people DIDN’T walk on. The floor pad things are going to offer only minimal protection, particularly given that sliding around is crucial to their function.

Hydraulics or pneumatics with some simple mechanical locks wouldn’t cost that much more (if at all), and would be practically silent and as smooth as when the island dropped down. The scissor lift is overkill, and noisey, but a good price.

Im sure like most islands there is some type of storage in there so a collapsible table wouldn’t work to well.
I agree that you would want some type of sliding trap door that cover the top of the island…you don’t want people walking all over where you prepare food.
Very nice though!

While it’s wasteful of water every home with a modern water supply has a low PSI hydraulic power source that can do a lot of work if properly designed.

As they say different stroke, for different folks. But this is something I don’t understand, unless someone needs their kitchen to do double duty as a dance studio, or something similar. My home has a kitchen island, I can’t imagine having to do anything to make it available for use. Like the toilet is most useful by being there at the ready. I could imagine all the neighborhood kids going to that home to take a ride on the counter, if a family with kids ever own one.

Neat, except the tiles, I can hear the arguments already – “Why do you never put the tiles back after you?!”.

@h4x0r as for the actually article tl;dr; but the phone does make a handy universal remote for a lot of projects, and I don’t really find it that hard to locate, mine is normally stuck on me. But agree that a wall mounted switch or hidden switch al la James Bond villain would improve the build.

Hmm… If it droped a few inchs lower and a panel slid across from under the floor next to it and popped up through the hole to match the level of the floor when it island was lowered so you were not walking on the table top. And the carpet squares had neodymium magnets stuck to the underside and are pulled back by another set of magnets on the sliding floor panel when it moves back under the floor revelling the table top. And after being lowered the carpet squares would be pulled back to their original position. Hmm… If I put this much thought into useful ideas I might be a lot richer haha

Low PSI water sources (~50 – 70 PSI) are unsuitable for hydraulic purposes, which tend to run 3000+ PSI. You *can* multiply them using hydraulics but not with water PSI alone.

Also, I don’t understand the confusion here exactly over the scissor lift and hydraulic terminology. You could do this with a hydraulic scissor lift – all of the ones we have are in fact hydraulic and some can lift somewhere around 5000+ lbs as a working load.

ok, everyone needs to RTFA. Its a hydraulic scissor jack he got used off of ebay. The island can be lowered with either a wall switch or his iphone.
Also, the pool cue rack that opens the utility room actually lines up an RFID chip and that is what opens the door. Seriously cool home automation/hacking going on here.
Walking on your counter top is not as gross as it seems. Unless you never clean your floors, and you wear your shoes all over your house. The worst thing to me is that he lets cats live in his house.